George Gilbert Scott's plans for the vast, ornate facade of St Pancras were put together in the 1870s with a unifying ideal: to combine Britain's historical heritage with the latest in Victorian technology. Hence the building's Gothic spires mingling with its vaulting, complex ironwork. This, after all, was the age of 'chivalry and steam', according to Thackeray, and St Pancras is the apotheosis of that concept: the nation's finest neo-Gothic edifice, a structure built, as Scott put it, 'on so vast a scale as to rule its neighbourhood, instead of being governed by it'.

These factors made St Pancras a particularly appropriate choice as the London terminal for Britain's first international, high-speed rail line from which, this Wednesday, the first Eurostar trains will glide on their way to Paris and Brussels. Chivalry, a steam-age terminus and now 21st-century glitz: it is a highly promising combination.

The fact that the station and its Gothic hotel came within a whisker of being demolished in the Sixties gives the St Pancras story an extra piquancy, as Simon Bradley makes clear in this expertly crafted history. This was never a lucky building. Conceived on a vast scale, its hotel only flourished for a few decades, before other, better-plumbed outfits such as the Ritz began providing slicker accommodation. The station still ran trains, albeit local ones, while the hotel was turned to office space. The whole thing would have been destroyed to make way for a Sixties office block and sports hall had not John Betjeman launched a campaign to save it. (Hence the seven-foot statue to the poet laureate erected in the station's new concourse.) The main building lay abandoned after that, its paintwork 'crazed and blistering, hanging frond-like from ceilings or scattered in slivers across bare-boarded floors', as Bradley so eloquently puts it.

But now St Pancras has been resurrected and turned, by London and Continental Railways, into a stately pleasure dome. Travellers from the station will get champagne bars, restaurants, shopping malls, high-speed trains - and, for good measure, an intriguing history.